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It’s not just for nerds – a beginner’s guide to Facebook Analytics

In this post, I briefly discussed Facebook Insights (FI), the free analytics tool offered by Facebook.

Today, I’m going to discuss the options that FI offers and the stats that you may find handy. If you are already familiar with FI, you may want to move on, because this is aimed at beginners.

First, to collect insights, you need to have a Facebook PAGE (not a profile, a page), and the page needs to have at least 30 likes. If you don’t have 30 likes yet, you may want to start by trying to build your followers and then bookmark this page so you are ready when the time comes. For more FI questions please refer to Facebook’s help section.

Image 1

Once you come to the FI dashboard (image 2), you can obtain a variety of information:

Main Overview Tab

This page of the dashboard shows you results for the last month, months or year, depending on what time period you select in that date box at the top. Here you can view your Likes (how many people click are fans of your page) and Daily/Weekly/Monthly Active Users (people who have viewed or interacted with your page)

Also on this page, Interactions (people who have clicked “like” or made a comment on any of your posts)

Image 2 - the Insights dashboard

Users Tab

Who is looking at your page? Do you know or do you only THINK you know? As I have mentioned several times, these numbers allow you to see what is really going on, and allows you to run your marketing efforts based on facts – not on intuition.

You can see your audience segmented by age, gender, language and location. You can use this information to create targeted Facebook ads that can be customized to appear on the page of a very finely targeted demographic. In addition, you can start to understand who is really consuming your content.

You can also see how external visitors (people coming from outside of Facebook) found your page. Through this External Referrers stat, I realized early on that one of our key sites did not have a Facebook link – a problem I quickly rectified to boost out Facebook traffic.

Interactions Tab

What about that post you put up last week? Did anyone even see it? This tab allows you to look at your posts and see how they rank in terms of feedback (likes and comments) and impressions (how many people saw them).

Again, this helps you understand which pieces of content are exciting your viewers and which ones leave them cold. You can also experiment with different posting days/times and see what reaction you get.

Download

The best part – you can download these stats to an Excel spreadsheet to help you craft a report. Now your boss will know what a valuable analytics tyrannosaurus you are – just like me!